Even before Lowell speaks, Samantha has an intuition that the phone call will be momentous, but that is because she is already in a state of febrile and heightened alert. She hears the under- and overtones when people talk. She imagines an aura of electro-magnetic feelers extending invisibly from her skin and waving about her like angel hair, like the sustenance system of certain sea creatures on tropical reefs: as water rakes through their unseen silken mesh traps, all that is needed stays. Information is falling toward her. It adheres.
“Samantha?” Lowell says, and she recognizes his voice instantly. She has heard it often enough on his answering machine. She has scripted future conversations they will have.
An avalanche starts with a pebble. Samantha thinks of the random searchlight of Cassie’s lucidity as setting scree tumbling, loose drifts of it that pull scattered data along in their train. They gather density and speed. Clusters of detail roll over each other and cling. They generate force and the force intensifies. Disparate pieces of information cohere, connections pick up momentum, new facts are exposed. Samantha has a premonition that critical mass has been reached, that the accumulation of data has hooked up isolated circuits, that currents are fizzing around the elaborate latticework and traplines of her research, sparks jumping gaps, missing information being sucked into the black hole of her intense need to know.
“Um … it’s Lowell,” he says.
Samantha holds her breath.
“This isn’t easy,” he says.
“I know.” She can barely speak, and an inner catechism warns: Don’t breathe. Don’t frighten him off. “Not for any of us. It’s like picking a scab.”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, that’s what it’s like.” That is exactly what it is like, he thinks. As soon as he starts to think about the hijacking, fresh bleeding begins.
It is strange how a silence can suck at two people and how it can vibrate between them and how much information can be sent and received through the mere sound of air moving in and out of lungs. And because something is already understood between the two of them, that the thing itself—the blown-up plane, the horrible deaths—is beyond comprehension and beyond language, because of this, they do not feel any awkwardness in a prolonged silence.
Samantha waits.
“In my case,” Lowell says, “the death was … the death itself … the death of my mother was not the major thing.” His breath, turning labored, is loud in Samantha’s ear. “Look,” he says. “I don’t think I can manage this, after all. I don’t think I can talk about it.”
Samantha listens to the plosive beat, rapid and uneven, of air entering and leaving his lungs. She risks saying, “Is that because of Avi Levinstein?”
Lowell makes a small violent sound—he is hyperventilating—and Samantha is afraid he will hang up.
“How do you know about Levinstein?” he asks at last.
“I know his son. I only just learned that the woman Avi Levinstein took with him to Paris was your mother, so I know this must be a painful—”
Lowell hangs up. A week passes and then he calls again.
“You have no idea how angry I was,” he tells Sam without preamble. “I wanted both of them to die.” His voice is faint, and Samantha has to strain to hear. “To make a wish like that and have it come true. Do you see what that makes me?”
Samantha says nothing.
“Do you understand what that makes me?” he persists.
“I understand what you fear it makes you. But it was natural for you to be angry—” She can almost hear Lowell twisting in the fires of his own savage guilt. “Look,” she says, “I don’t know if this might help, or if you’ll want to do this. And I’m not at all sure he’ll want to do it either. But I know Jacob Levinstein well. He’s a phoenix. I mean, he’s one of us, the children who survived. We have an Internet club. We call ourselves phoenixes because we rose up out of the ashes, so to speak. Jacob’s the son of Avi—”
Lowell makes a strangled sound, somewhere between laughter and pain. “Are you crazy?”
“He feels pretty much the same way as you do, I think. It might clear the air for both of you if you—”
“I didn’t call to talk about my mother.”
Samantha suddenly wonders if Lowell’s mother was one of those who caressed her as she passed, when the hijackers were pushing the children along the aisles, when the children were being herded, prodded with rifles, when the rough hands of gunmen slapped them, when the gunmen stuffed rags into sobbing mouths. Samantha finds herself wondering which hands might have belonged to Lowell’s mother, because hands had come from everywhere as the children passed, hands stroking them, touching, giving blessing, sending messages that she bears in her body still.
“I’m really calling,” Lowell says more calmly, “because you said you had information about my father—”
“It may not be the kind of information that you want.”
“I’m sure it won’t be,” Lowell says. “But you said there was a woman in Paris who knew my father, who claims to be—you said I have a half-sister.”
“I think so, yes.”
“Is she claiming this, or are you?”
“She is. But she claims she has proof. You didn’t know about her?”
“No. And I don’t believe her, but I’m curious.”
“I’ll understand if you’re not ready for this,” Samantha says, but Please, she is thinking, please stay on the line, please give me something, another crumb, two crumbs, I can wait for the trail.
“My father’s first wife died,” Lowell says. “And they never had children. My mother was his second wife and I was an only child.” He pauses, assessing possible evidence, pro and con. “But he was stationed in Paris for several years,” he concedes. “During his first marriage.”
“He had an affair with a Frenchwoman. I’ve semi-confirmed this from declassified documents. The CIA kept files on a woman who worked at the American Embassy because they considered her a security risk. She had a daughter by an American, a diplomat or an agent, it isn’t clear which. Françoise claims that was your father. She says she has photographs to prove it. You can make contact with her through our website if you want.”
“I have to think about it.”
“She seems to know a lot about your father. She says he’s in Intelligence.”
“He was.”
“Was?”
“He died in a car crash two months ago. September.”
“Oh,” Samantha says. She feels winded. She can feel a red-hot trail fizzle out. “What date?”
“Four days before the anniversary,” he says. “So you don’t know everything.”
“There’s way too much I don’t know.”
“You hadn’t been hounding my father the way you hounded me?”
“I apologize for hounding you. I guess I was obnoxious. I’m sorry.”
“Well, not obnoxious,” he says. “But relentless, yes.”
“I’m sorry. I get like that every September.”
“Yeah,” he says, softening. “I freak out too. Every year.”
“I’m obsessive-compulsive about it, I guess. About anything to do with the hijacking.”
“I am too, but in the opposite way. Compulsive avoidance. But if you’re, you know, so obsessive, how come you didn’t hound my father?”
“I only just found out about him, from Françoise. People like your father aren’t listed in the telephone book.”
“How’d you find out about me?”
“The passenger list’s always been available. Each passenger listed one next-of-kin with the airline for notification. Your mother listed you.”
“Yes, I suppose she would. How’d you find this Françoise?”
“I didn’t. She contacted me. On the website for Flight 64.”
“I avoid anything like that,” Lowell says.
“So. Do you want to meet me and talk?”
“I’m not sure. Where’s this area code? D.C., isn’t it? Is that where you live?”
“Yes. But I could come up to Boston for a weekend. Or we could pick somewhere in between, like New York.”
“Maybe,” he says. “I’m not sure. I have to be careful.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” Lowell says nervously. “I don’t mean anything.”
A hole-in-the-wall café in Penn Station is not where Samantha would have picked, but Lowell insists. He has a soft-sided overnight bag with him and he keeps it on his lap. He looks around.
“Are you expecting someone?” Sam asks.
“What? No. No, no. Just checking the joint. It’s like lead in paint.”
“Lead in paint?”
“Old paint. Before they banned lead. Once you know about it, you see it everywhere. I’ve had medical problems,” he says. “Even walls become dangerous, know what I mean?”
“Uh-huh,” she says doubtfully, trying to follow.
“I paint houses,” he explains. “Lot of old houses in Boston, peeling paint. I have to strip them. Lead levels are up in my blood.”
“Uh-huh. I don’t know much about—”
“Heart problems. Nervous system. I get tested every month. You live with it.” Eyes darting, he checks each stream of New York commuters spilling into the concourse at Penn. “You get to expect danger. Could come from any direction.”
“Got you,” she says. “But, ah, it’s not lead poisoning you’re checking for here.”
“No.” Their eyes meet for a moment, then skitter away.
“Message received,” she breathes. She suddenly wants to call Jacob. She wants to check in with him, make sure he is okay. “I could order us a bottle,” she says to Lowell. “I need a drink, don’t you? But I wouldn’t trust the house wine here. Sweetened cleaning fluid.”
Lowell blinks at her. “Wine? No, not my poison. Whatever’s on tap,” he tells the waiter.
“Your father was in Intelligence.” Sam’s voice has dropped to a whisper.
Lowell says warily, “If you were hoping for information about that, I don’t have any.”
“Your half-sister thinks—”
“This Françoise—”
“Yes. She thinks your father—her father—knew about Flight 64. In advance, I mean.”
Lowell is holding his overnight bag tightly against his chest. He feels the skin of the bag incessantly with his fingers as though checking that its internal organs are still there. He prods at something, and reassures himself about its outline, a rectangular one. A book, Samantha thinks; or perhaps a box. One of Lowell’s feet against the leg of the bistro table is making the metal rattle against the floor.
“You’re not surprised,” Sam whispers, watching him closely. “You knew that your father knew.”
Lowell lurches and the table tips and Sam grabs for her wine. An amber wave sloshes over the edge of Lowell’s beer glass. “What? I am surprised,” he whispers fiercely. “Of course I’m surprised. Why wouldn’t I be surprised? Besides, the statement’s ridiculous. Flights to the US are always at risk, all the time. My father knew that, the way all of us know it, only he was more aware of it than most. Naturally.”
“This was quite specific, Françoise claims. There was a tip-off about Flight 64.”
The bistro table is rattling so noisily that both Lowell and Sam lean forward on the marble top, dampening the racket with their weight. Sam can feel the tremor reaching her fingertips. When Lowell speaks, she can feel the puff of air from his lips. “There are scores of tip-offs every week,” he says. “Most of them hoaxes.”
“But not this one. The French police had Charles de Gaulle on high security alert, except the passengers weren’t told. Françoise thinks your father knew. She thinks his information was quite precise.”
Why? Lowell’s lips form the question, though no sound comes out. He is beginning to hyperventilate.
“She had a ticket for Flight 64, but she never got on the plane because—”
Lowell laughs in a nervous high-pitched way. “I bet this is about blackmail,” he says.
Sam presses her own foot down on Lowell’s, to stop the trembling. “That doesn’t seem to be her motivation,” she says. “She’s got something heavy on her conscience, is my impression. She wants to set something right. She wants to make contact with you.”
Lowell recoils. “You didn’t tell her how to reach me?”
His eyes constantly monitor the Penn Station throng. Sometimes he twists his chair to carry out sentry duty from a new angle. From time to time, he partially unzips his overnight bag and reaches in to feel the contents, checking.
“What’s in your bag?” Samantha asks in a low voice. “Nothing,” he says. “My things. How much information did you give her?”
“I didn’t give her anything, but she can easily find it herself.”
“Great,” Lowell says. “That’s just great. Wait. Where are you going?”
“I have to make a phone call,” Samantha says. Her own panic reflex is high. In a pay phone booth, she dials Jacob’s office number, then tries him at home. Both times, she gets his answering machine.
“Jacob,” she says. Her voice wavers. “It’s Sam. Just wanted to know you’re okay. Don’t get upset, but I’m meeting with Lowell, you know, the son of the woman … We’re in a fast-food joint at Penn Station, and he knows more than he’s letting on. I’ll call back later, okay? I just want you to know where I am.”
At the table, Lowell has his backpack pinned between his knees. He is holding his beer glass with both hands. “There are Civil War junkies,” he says, “and Titanic junkies, and Elvis-sighting junkies.” He gulps down his beer. “I can tell you’re a hijack junkie. Someone who collects every harebrained rumor from loonies on the Web—”
Samantha bridles. “I may be a junkie, but I’m rigorous. I read declassified documents, I read the airline reports, I read newspaper archives, I contact survivors and families. I’m doing this for a senior thesis in American history. Everything has to be documented.”
“So what have you documented?”
“Nothing much yet,” she concedes. “But I’m working on it. And I think the odds are that you do have a half-sister even though Françoise may not be her real name.”
“Okay, so maybe I have a half-sister. And okay, maybe she had a ticket for the same flight—is that confirmed?”
“Not yet. But it will be. I’ve applied for a research grant to go to Paris for spring semester. I want to meet with Françoise. I want to see her ticket. She says she’s still got it.”
“Air tickets are easy to forge. She’s just a name on the Web. Some people get high on that. They make up names, they cruise websites—”
“I know that. That’s why I want to go to Paris. I want to meet her, check her ID, check her birth certificate, date of birth, check her driver’s—”
“I bet this is about the will,” Lowell says. “My father’s will. Fishy that she suddenly pops up now, the way scores of women claimed to be Anastasia, the czar’s daughter—”
“Maybe. But she made contact in August, before your father died.”
“Maybe she knew what was coming,” Lowell says.
They stare at each other.
“I’ll tell you something else that’s creepy,” Samantha whispers. “My mother was on that flight, right? My mother’s sister was living in Paris and sharing an apartment with a woman named Françoise. I know, I know, it’s a common name. It gives me a strange little buzz, just the same. That’s another reason why I want to go to Paris. My aunt has a photograph of her Françoise.”
“Thirteen years,” Lowell says. “People change.”
“We can ask Françoise who her roommate was in ’87. If she names my aunt—”
“It might mean she’s as good at ferreting out information as you are. Professional con men—or con women—are brilliant at that sort of thing.”
“I know. I know that might be all it means. On the other hand, it might mean that your half-sister shared an apartment with my aunt.”
“And what would that prove?” Lowell asks.
“I don’t know what it would prove, but it would be very creepy.”
“Have you ever heard of Sirocco?” Lowell whispers, leaning close.
“Yes.” Samantha watches him intently. “I’ve met him in declassified documents. Not too often. Probably only when the declassifying inspector missed blacking him out.”
“What do you know about him?”
“He had something to do with the hijacking. I think he was the chief hatchet man. The ‘rogue agent’, as they say.”
“The foreigner who actually does the dirty work,” Lowell says.
“I think so.”
“Saudi?” Lowell says.
“I think so. Or possibly Egyptian. So you’ve been filing Freedom of Information applications too?”
“No.” Lowell reaches for the bag on the floor between his feet and lifts it back onto his lap. He keeps the soft handles twisted around his wrist. “I have a different source of … I happened on inside information accidentally.”
Samantha leans across the table toward him. “What about Salamander?” she asks. “Do you have anything on him?”
“He’s American.”
“I know he is. He’s the one I want to find. He’s the prime mover.”
“I think my father knew who Salamander was,” Lowell says. “I think he knew who Sirocco was. I think my father died because he knew.”
“What is in your bag?”
“Better you don’t know.”
“Your father,” Samantha says carefully, “that August and September. Is there anything you can remember that might shed light …?”
Lowell groans. “If you knew how much I’ve tried to forget.”
And then he starts to explain the too much that he remembers too well.
Lowell remembers bad dreams and wet sheets and his mother there, holding him. He remembers giants with eyes of green fire. He remembers clanking monsters made of cans, like the Tin Man grown huge as an elephant. The giants shook his father like a toy, they sliced him in two. “Daddy, Daddy!” Lowell would scream, and his mother was always there, holding him, rocking him, crooning.
“Daddy’s away, baby,” she would murmur. “But Mommy’s here.”
He remembers the sweet smell of her skin and her hair, the smell of talcum and of Parisian perfume. She would turn on the light and read a story, and then she would sing in the dark.
He remembers two birthday parties when his father was home: his fourth birthday and his seventh. He remembers the three happy faces in the glow of the candles on his cake. He remembers the bedtime stories his father told. He remembers Odysseus tied to the mast, and Theseus and the Minotaur, and Atalanta and the golden apples, and Leda and the swan. He remembers his first day at school: how lonely his mother looked, standing there. He can feel it still, like an oceanic grief that drowns, that swamps, that pulls at him, that takes his air, the way her sad smile washes over him, and he vows he will devote each day of his life to making her happy. It is the thing he most passionately desires. He remembers the day she sat at the kitchen table, not moving, and said, “Are you ready for school, Lowell? Your lunch box is in the fridge,” and he remembers how the flatness of her voice frightened him because it was late afternoon and he had stayed to play baseball after class. He remembers how he had gone outside and searched for the most perfect flower in the garden to give to her. He remembers how he prayed that the flower would make her smile, and he remembers how she looked at it vaguely—it was a white rose, heavily fragrant—as though not knowing what it was, and how she then frowned and looked at it steadily and how her eyes filled with tears. He remembers how she pressed her lips together and how she could not speak for some time, and how she then said to him, “Dearest Lowell, what a gift you are. What a gift. You are all I have,” and how he had the sensation of being sucked into a funnel that went down into the center of the earth where blackness and nothingness were.
Lowell remembers his father saying, “Your mother doesn’t have the resources, Lowell, to cope with my frequent absences,” his father saying it gravely and kindly, “or with the requirements of my position, the requirements of silence and of secrecy, which demand a special kind …” his father explaining, “I married too young the first time, Lowell, and then I was lonely when my first wife died, and I made another mistake, but you’ve made up for that. I’m counting on you. I’m counting on you to look after your mother, you know what I mean.
“I’m counting on you,” his father said, “to be strong like Achilles, and to carry on the Hawthorne tradition at school. It’s all the more important, Lowell …
“Your mother,” his father said, he remembers his father saying, “is in a state of low-grade nervous depression, Lowell. It’s not her fault, not really, but I’m counting on you to keep an eye …” He remembers all the textures of sadness, his father’s sadness, his mother’s, and his own, and he remembers the absences, the loneliness, the sound of his mother crying at night. Lowell remembers, remembers, his head in his hands. Lowell remembers too much, and the silences between his revelations grow long.
“Was she?” Samantha prompts at last. “Your mother? Was she clinically depressed?”
“I suppose so. I suppose I was too, when I think back. It’s not that she wasn’t functional. She did all the right things. Whenever my father was home, there were dinner parties and receptions and soirées and little chamber music groups. It was all a glittering whirl, and my mother hosted all that. But there was …” Everywhere he turned, their lives were overcast with sadness and it almost choked Lowell, it made the house bleak. “There was always this fog,” he says. “I couldn’t shift it.” It exhausted him.
And then one day, suddenly, he was angry instead of sad, and that was easier. That was so much easier. He went off to boarding school, and he dreaded coming home. He would accept invitations to other homes, he’d even stay at school for long weekends. It was so much simpler not being home. Not having to note his father’s absence or see his mother’s sad smile.
And then, one spring break, he ran out of options and he had to go home. His father was there for once and his parents hosted a reception for a string quartet …
Lowell felt the chemistry, he felt it the first time his mother and Avi Levinstein looked at each other, and it broke his heart. All his life’s energy, all his little-boy prayers, all his wishbone wishes at Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners, had gone into trying to shift that black cloud of sadness from her shoulders, and Avi Levinstein walked in and did it by looking at her.
“I hated Levinstein. And I could never forgive my mother.”
The more alive, the more beautiful she became, the more angry Lowell grew. She told him she was leaving in May. “Lowell,” she said, radiant, “I’m in love.”
“You want a gold star for that?” he said rudely. He had just turned sixteen.
“Oh Lowell,” she said. “Please be happy for me,” and he remembers that she told him that his father was a good man, a dear man, such a dear man, and how she did not want to hurt his father or make him unhappy, but Lowell surely knew, he surely understood that between them, between his father and his mother, things had not been working out very well, Lowell must have known that. And he remembers that she told him that they—that his mother and Levinstein—were going to Paris for a while, and that his father was filing for divorce and she would not contest, she would consent to being the guilty party, she would grant his father that, but that after the divorce she and Avi Levinstein would return to New York and would get married. “But for the time being, we will stay in Paris,” he remembers her saying with wings on her voice. “Will you come and visit us in Paris? Please, Lowell. It is something I would like very much.”
“I turned around and walked away,” Lowell says. “I refused to kiss her goodbye. That was in May. May 1987. I never saw her again.”
Four months later, she called from Paris to say they were flying home. The fall term had just begun and Lowell took the call in the hallway of his boarding-school dorm, a bleak brown tunnel with no light at either end. His mother sounded rapturously happy. She gave Lowell her flight number and date of arrival, and Lowell hung up on her. He dialed Washington and left a message on his father’s answering machine. He said only, “They are coming back.”
Two days later, he took another call in the same hallway. “How are you, Lowell?”
“I’m fine, Dad.”
“I have handled my life very badly,” his father said.
Lowell said awkwardly, “No, you haven’t, Dad.”
“Don’t make my mistakes, Lowell,” his father said. He sounded agitated. Then he said, “Would you do something for me?”
“Sure,” Lowell said.
“It’s very important,” his father said. “It’s very, very important, Lowell.”
“Sure, Dad.”
“I want you to call your mother and tell her not to come back. Not yet. Not at this particular … It’s a very bad time for me. Tell her it’s a very bad time.”
Lowell said doubtfully, “I don’t think she’s going to pay much attention, Dad.”
“She has to,” his father said. “You have to make her pay attention, Lowell. Tell her to wait another month. This is very important, Lowell.”
“Okay, Dad. I’ll try.”
Lowell called his mother’s hotel in Paris to leave a message, and was disconcerted to be connected with her direct. “Dad’s very upset,” he said icily. “He doesn’t want you to come back. He wants you to wait another month.”
After a small silence, she asked him, “What do you want, Lowell?”
“I want you to stop hurting Dad.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll do that, Lowell. Tell your father I’ll change our flights. We won’t come back till October.”
Lowell called his father’s office immediately. “Your father’s out of the country,” the secretary said, “but he checks for messages every day. What would you like me to tell him?”
“Tell him she agreed,” Lowell said. “She won’t come back till October. He’ll know what that means.”
The secretary repeated the message. “She agreed. Won’t come back till October. I’ll let him know.”
“Where is he?” Lowell asked.
“You know I’m not supposed to tell you that,” the secretary said. “But I did book his flight to Paris.”
“Do you know where he’s staying? Do you have a number?”
“They never let us know that,” the secretary said. “You know that, Lowell. For all I know, he might have flown on to Moscow or Timbuktu. I never know where they’re calling in from, they have a code. But he’ll get your message,” she promised.
Not until days after the hijacking did Lowell receive the note scribbled down by someone else in his dorm. Your mother called and wants you to call her back. Says she can’t change the flight because ** (sorry, couldn’t catch name)** because someone-or-other has concert scheduled.
Lowell could never bring himself to show this note to his father. He was too shocked, too stunned, when he saw Mather next. His father seemed to have aged twenty years in a single week. Gaunt, Lowell thought. His father was the very embodiment of the word. There was a swatch of white hair at one temple. His face seemed to have shrunk back against the skull, the cheeks sunken beneath the bones.
“You said she agreed.” His father’s voice broke. Almost, Lowell sensed, his father was going to hug him. His father swayed, then steadied himself and extended his right hand.
Lowell shook it. “Dad,” he said.
“Son.”
“I would rather be a serf in the house of some landless man,” his father said, “than king of all these dead men. Do you recognize that, Lowell?”
“The Odyssey,” Lowell said.
“This is a dreadful thing,” his father said. “A dreadful thing.”
“Yes,” Lowell said.
“Bear, O my heart; thou hast borne a yet harder thing. You said your mother agreed to wait till October.”
“She did,” Lowell said. He felt as ill as his father looked. He was vertiginous with guilt. “She did agree. I just don’t understand what happened.”
“I tried,” his father said. “I did what I could.”
It was the only time Lowell ever saw his father weep.